Corporate culture and absorptive capacity: The moderating role of national culture dimensions on innovation management

Firms have to strive for innovation constantly in order to gain and retain a competitive advantage, which renders absorptive capacity (ACAP) – a firm’s ability to absorb and apply external knowledge – highly relevant. Based on data obtained from 592 CEOs and managers of firms in Austria, Brazil, Germany, India, Singapore, and the United States, we show how ACAP can be fostered in an international context. We analyze how corporate culture affects potential as well as realized ACAP and how national culture dimensions moderate these relationships in a fit-as-moderation model. We reveal that the adhocracy culture supports potential and realized ACAP, whereas the market and hierarchy cultures hinder both potential and realized ACAP. Moreover, the relationship between corporate culture and potential ACAP is stable across national culture dimensions, whereas selected national and corporate cultures are more effective in fostering realized ACAP. These results open up opportunities for researchers and support firms in their attempts to foster their firms’ knowledge management processes.     

Modern Russian corporate governance: convergent forces or product of Russia’s history?

Does Russian corporate governance in the new millennium amount to a gradual evolution towards US-style corporate governance, or can it be expected to continue to reflect historical institutions and national culture? When multinationals complain about State interference in firms’ strategies and operations, can this be a permanent state of affairs, or is the situation likely to change?After 1991, Russia, in the middle of a huge crisis, embarked on a program of mass privatization, ostensibly with a view to creating full, market-based corporate governance, with open information disclosure, and enterprise ownership by outside investors having no relationship with the firm other then through their shares. In practice, however, it has become clear that a very different pattern has emerged, especially in manufacturing industries with relational investors, including managers and employees, as well as banks and other firms linked horizontally or vertically, little share liquidity. There is continued hostility towards active western and other genuinely ‘outside’ investors, and persistently strong State influence. This paper argues that this outcome can only be understood in the context of business history.     

Corporate governance and firm performance in emerging markets: Evidence from Turkey

This is a study of the relationship between context, internal corporate governance and firm performance, looking at the case of Turkey, an exemplar of family capitalism. We found more concentrated ownership, often in the hands of families, led to firms performing better; concentrated ownership means that controlling families bear more of the risks of poor performance. Less predictably, given that the institutional environment is so well attuned to family ownership, we found that mechanisms that accord room for a greater range of voices and interests within and beyond families – larger boards and foreign ownership stakes – seem to also make for positive performance effects. We also noted that increase in cross ownership did not influence market performance, but was negatively associated with accounting performance. Conversely, we found that a higher proportion of family members on boards had no discernable effect on performance. Our findings provide further insights on the relationship between the type of institutions encountered in many emerging markets, internal corporate governance configurations and firm performance.     

Intragroup Transactions,Corporate Governance,and Corporate Philanthropy in Korean Business Groups

This study examines how the corporate philanthropy decisions of group-affiliated firms in Korea (Chaebol firms) are made. Based on the attention-based view, we argue that when corporate decision makers at group-affiliated firms focus their attention more (less) on internal markets than external stakeholders because of the firm’s high (low) reliance on intragroup transactions, the firm will decrease (increase) its level of corporate philanthropy. We further argue that the relationship will be stronger when governance mechanisms focus on the instrumental value of corporate philanthropy. Using a panel sample of group-affiliated firms in Korea from 2011 to 2015, we find that as intragroup sales increase, the level of corporate philanthropy decreases, and such a negative relationship is stronger when outside director representation and foreign investor ownership are high. Our study suggests that internal dependence and corporate governance mechanisms jointly affect the level of corporate philanthropy at firms in a business group. Thus, this study contributes to the literature on corporate philanthropy, business group, and corporate governance.     

Does Good Governance Matter to Institutional Investors? Evidence from the Enactment of Corporate Governance Guidelines

Corporate governance guidelines are a mechanism that a firm can enact which should reduce agency costs and better align the interests of boards and the suppliers of capital. This study examines stock price reactions primarily attributable to institutional investors occurring when corporations announce the enactment of corporate governance guidelines. A final sample of 77 firms was derived from the first announcement of corporate governance guidelines exclusive to the SEC-EDGAR database. The results indicate that good governance does matter. Firms that announced the enactment of corporate governance guidelines experienced increased stock prices following the announcements. There was an immediate (days 1–4) reaction for firms that provided all or part of the guidelines’ substance; a delayed (days 8–10) reaction occurred for those firms that only referenced the guidelines’ enactment. Additionally, firms with either a potentially greater following or that had a previous history of acrimonious relations with stakeholders were rewarded by the announcement of the enactment of guidelines.     

Cross-border marketing ecosystem orchestration: A conceptualization of its determinants and boundary conditions

The authors propose that the current trends and developments in the international marketplace call for a new theoretical concept-based approach to inform and guide cross-border marketing strategy. Specifically, the authors label this approach marketing ecosystem orchestration (MEO). The marketing ecosystem is defined as connected, interdependent, and co-evolving sets of actors, activities, and institutions enabling the marketing of an offering that has value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. MEO is a new strategic approach for an internationalizing firm to achieve sustained value creation, value appropriation, and growth in a host market. Orchestration involves developing and/or coordinating the ecosystem’s interdependent – but independent actors, resources, information, processes, and services to create, co-create, and appropriate value from firms’ market-based assets. The authors theorize three components of MEO – the orchestration of supply chains and fulfillment networks, marketing communications, and transactions and payments sub-ecosystems – and develop a conceptual framework and propositions influencing the determinants of MEO adoption by the focal firm. This paper concludes with managerial implications and offers several new directions for international marketing research.     

Corporate governance in publicly traded small firms: A study of Canadian venture exchange companies

Most evidence regarding the determinants and effects of corporate governance practices is based on large firms. Herein, we explore these issues in the context of small publicly traded Canadian companies. We exploit the fact that such firms were not subject to corporate governance guidelines prior to 2005 and thus analyze the determinants of voluntary governance practice choices, as well as the effects of those practices on firm performance. Using a unique data set, we construct a corporate governance index for each firm. We measure performance by two variables: quality of accounting earnings and financial performance. The results indicate that corporate governance does matter for smaller traded Canadian firms. We find that both accounting and financial performance are positively related to corporate governance; however, their underlying mechanisms may differ somewhat. Given this result, it would be natural to expect all firms to choose higher levels of governance. However, our results also suggest small firms face resource constraints that limit their choices. We conclude that good governance is an important driver of small firm performance that cannot be neglected by the owners and managers of these firms.     

The effect of corporate governance on firm value and profitability: Time-series evidence from Turkey

We study the corporate governance practices of Turkish public firms from 2006 to 2012, relying on hand-collected data covering the vast majority of listed firms. We build a Turkey Corporate Governance Index, TCGI, composed of subindices for board structure, board procedure, disclosure, ownership, and shareholder rights. TCGI predicts higher market value (with firm fixed effects) and higher firm-level profitability with firm random effects. The principal subindex which predicts higher market value and profitability, and drives the results for TCGI as a whole, is disclosure subindex. We also study the determinants of firms' governance and find that most firm-specific factors have little effect on firms' governance choices.     

Corporate governance,globalization and firm productivity

We examine the relationship between globalization, corporate governance and firm productivity. The results, using longitudinal data from Korea, indicate that the positive effect of liberalising equity ownership on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) was reinforced by indirect managerial effects when a firm improved its corporate governance. Our findings also confirm that the interaction of the managerial effect with increased foreign equity ownership is more significant than interaction with exports, suggesting that liberalising foreign investment in the host market is more effective in capitalising on the potential benefits of corporate governance reform than increasing exports to overseas markets, reflected in learning by exporting.     

Corporate ownership and the theory of the multinational enterprise

This paper makes a contribution to the theory of the multinational enterprise (MNE) and, in particular, to why firms undertake foreign direct investment (FDI) rather than alternative strategies. We argue that FDI and its strategic alternatives involve different patterns of costs and returns over time, and hence different levels of risk and uncertainty. Traditional theories of the MNE conceptualize the firm as a risk-neutral decision-making entity with short-term efficiency objectives, and hence do not take these issues into account. This may be reasonable for firms with passive professional managers and widely-dispersed shareholders, operating in countries with the Anglo-American system of corporate governance. But many firms operate under quite different systems of corporate governance where concentrated shareholdings are commonplace and markets for corporate control are weak or non-existent. In these cases, shareholders exert considerable influence on all aspects of firm strategy including FDI. Furthermore, different groups of shareholders (State, family, institutions) are likely to have different objectives, different attitudes towards risk, and different decision-making time horizons. We thus suggest that the traditional theories of the MNE need to be extended to embrace consideration of corporate ownership (and other governance dimensions).     

How may the nature of family firms explain the decisions concerning international diversification?

This study explores how the ownership structure of family firms gives these organizations a distinctive nature in terms of international diversification. We argue that the heterogeneity of family firms may cause variations in the degree of international diversification among these types of businesses. We have studied three factors related to ownership structure: the degree of family ownership and the type and degree of ownership of the second largest shareholder (another family or a financial company). The empirical evidence is provided by a sample of European and Asian family firms (2004–2008). Our results show that the degree of family ownership has a negative impact on the degree of international diversification. However, the presence and ownership share of a financial company as the second largest shareholder in a family firm favor this diversification. This study also reveals the importance of the financial company as a second owner in the preference family firms show for growth in international markets.     

The Economic Theory of International Supply Chains: A Systems View

This paper offers an integrated analysis of outsourcing, offshoring, and foreign direct investment within a systems view of international business. This view takes the supply chain rather than the firm as the basic unit of analysis. It argues that competition in the global economy selects supply chains that maximise the joint profit of all the firms in the chain. The systems view is compared with the firm-centred view commonly used in strategy literature. The paper shows that a firm’s strategy must be embedded within an efficient supply-chain strategy, and that this strategy must be negotiated with, rather than imposed upon, other firms. The paper analyses the conditions under which various supply-chain strategies – and by implication various firm-level strategies – are efficient. Only by adopting a systems view of supply chains is it possible to determine which firm-level strategies will succeed in a volatile global economy.     

Strategic entry or strategic exit? International presence by emerging economy enterprises

By proposing an integrated strategic choice framework, we theorize the distinctive dynamics of international expansion by emerging economy enterprises. Specifically, we explicate how these firms build international presence based on combined strategic entry (i.e., prompted by internal capabilities such as innovation and diversification) and strategic exit (i.e., pushed out by external handicaps at home such as institutional obstacles and market competition). Further, a firm’s cooperative ties with foreign multinationals in the former’s home country fortify the strategic entry intent, while ties with home government institutions weaken the strategic exit intent. We also demonstrate that building international presence helps bolster firm performance, highlighting the economic catch-up consequence of international expansion. Analyses of a two-year imbalanced panel data of 2136 firms statistically support our hypotheses.     

The role of corporate governance in FDI decisions: Evidence from Taiwan

There has been a considerable literature on the determinants of why firms undertake foreign direct investment (FDI), but very little on whether firms with different governance characteristics are more or less likely to venture overseas. For example, are family-controlled firms more predisposed to FDI than firms, with similar attributes, but different forms of ownership? Does the presence of institutional shareholders suggest a greater propensity to invest abroad? Does the composition of the Board of Directors have an impact? Most extant studies of corporate governance focus on the impact of governance factors on firm performance. However, these performance outcomes are a function of the strategic decisions made by the firms, which suggests it might be useful to consider the relationship between corporate governance factors and particular strategic decisions. One example is the decision to undertake foreign direct investment. The two main strands of IB literature on the determinants of FDI have little or nothing to say about how corporate governance factors might affect the FDI decision. Both internalisation theory and the resource-based view see FDI primarily as a means by which firms can appropriate rents in overseas markets from the exploitation of their idiosyncratic resources and capabilities. This paper extends this literature by investigating the effects of governance factors on the decision to undertake FDI. In particular, we want to assess the impact upon the FDI decision of (a) the extent of family control, (b) the presence of domestic and foreign institutional shareholders, and (c) the composition of the Board of Directors. We investigate these effects using a sample of 228 publicly listed firms in Taiwan, and our results clearly indicate that family control and share ownership by domestic financial institutions in Taiwanese firms are associated with the decision to undertake FDI. We also find that corporate governance impacts in different ways with regard to Taiwanese FDI in China in comparison to Taiwanese FDI in the rest of the world.     

Private Firms and Corporate Governance: An Integrated Economic and Management Perspective

This article provides a definition of corporate␣governance and highlights the challenges in adapting understanding of governance to the privately-held firm. We emphasize the need to develop the scope of governance in privately-held firms beyond the traditional agency theory focus in the financial economics literature relating to large publicly-listed corporations. There is a need to draw on and integrate an array of theoretical perspectives from both economics and other social science disciplines as well. We present a schematic model of corporate governance which places the contributions presented in the special issue in context and which serves as a guide to highlighting gaps in the research base. We review the principal issues relating to corporate governance in privately-held firms which relate to: governance in different organizational contexts (institutional context; the industrial sector within which the firm finds itself, the ownership context of the firm, and the stage within the firm’s life-cycle); the scope of corporate governance; and other internal governance mechanisms to be considered We identify areas for further research on corporate governance in privately-held firms with respect to processes of governance, organizational contexts, assumptions about the owners, executive remuneration, financial reporting, the nature of the dependent variable relating to the expected outcome of different approaches to governance and various methodological issues. We suggest a need to develop governance codes for privately-held firms that are flexible enough to take account of the different types of governance needs of firms at different stages in their life-cycle.      

Multiple influences on corporate governance practice in Nigeria: Agents,strategies and implications

The literature on the convergence of corporate governance systems across different institutional contexts has often taken the role of ‘agents of convergence’ for granted. Against this background, we examine the influences of three major agents – international organisations, rating agencies, and local institutions – on the development of corporate governance practices in Nigeria. Findings indicate that the understanding and practice of corporate governance in Nigeria are in a flux and being pulled in multiple directions by the agents studied. This paper provides one of the very few studies utilising sub-Saharan African (Nigerian) data in international business governance research.     

The Shareholder–Manager Relationship and Its Impact on the Likelihood of Firm Bribery

We examine the impact on firm bribery of two corporate governance devices heavily studied in corporate governance research—i.e., separation of ownership and control, and equity share of the largest shareholder. In addition, we investigate the impact of the principal–owner’s gender on firm bribery. From agency theory, we predict that firms with the owner also acting as a manager (owner–manager) are more likely to engage in bribery compared to their counterparts with separation of ownership and control. We argue that an increase of the equity share of the largest shareholder can either increase or decrease firm bribery likelihood depending on the net cost-benefit effect of such bribery actions. In addition, we predict that bribery is more likely to occur when the principal–owner is male rather than female. Using a rich dataset of the World Bank Enterprise Surveys of 2002–2005, we find that the equity share of the largest shareholder is negatively and male principal–owner is positively associated with the likelihood of firm bribery. Furthermore, we reveal that owner–manager is more likely to bribe when the principal–owner is male rather than female. We also observe that the effect of owner–manager is smaller as the equity share of the largest shareholder increases.     

险资入市促进了公司创新吗

随着国家政策的放开,保险公司持股上市企业的现象剧增,保险机构投资者逐渐成为中国资本市场中的重要角色,对企业经营决策发挥了重大作用。在此背景下,本文考察了险资入市对企业创新活动的影响。研究发现:一方面,保险机构投资者持股公司的研发投入和专利产出更少;另一方面,保险机构投资者持股公司的CEO强制变更概率更高,经营业绩更差。本文还讨论了保险公司影响企业创新背后的理论机理。本文研究表明,险资持股带来了过度监督效应,抑制了企业创新。本文有助于市场加深对保险机构的认识,丰富企业创新的相关研究,为改善公司治理提供建议。保险机构投资者是中国资本市场改革的重要力量,政府监管部门需合理引导保险机构投资者,使其发挥积极的外部治理作用。     

Building a competitive advantage based on transparency: When and why does transparency matter for corporate social responsibility?

Customers today are increasingly demanding transparency from firms. This article discusses the concept of performance transparency and explores when and why transparency plays a key role for a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) effectiveness. In doing so, it addresses consumer skepticism as the logic of the transparency-CSR interaction and presents empirical evidence of the effect. It also discusses key principles for managing performance transparency effectively. Companies should monitor and track performance transparency regularly, initiate consistent transparency practices along with CSR activities, pay attention to the types of information made available, and adapt the transparency practices to the involvement level.     

Corporate governance and MNE strategies in emerging economies

We explore factors of convergence and divergence in corporate governance of emerging and developed market economies, focussing on the role of firm internationalisation. In particular, foreign investments by emerging economy firms led to upgrade of their governance capabilities. These firms also became advocates for home-country policy reforms that mandated the development of similar capabilities for local firms. We present a broad overview of the literature and propose an approach that considers the evolution of corporate governance, both at the national level and the firm level, with MNEs from both emerging market economies and developed economies as active actors in this process.